Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope is set to release next month (9.04) and introduce Eucalyptus as an important building block for establishing cloud capabilities in your data center using entirely open source technologies within the Ubuntu distribution.

Meanwhile, the Canonical Server Team is also working diligently to deliver Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty images for Amazon EC2, for cloud computing beyond your local data center.

In the status bar across the bottom of your screen, you'll see several bits of system status, including an approximate running total cost of your current system. This estimation accounts for the current system uptime, number of processors, inbound, and outbound network activity. It does not yet account for S3 storage charges, or the 10% hike in European instance pricing, but such patches are welcome ;-) You can find the code in:

/var/lib/screen-profiles/ec2-cost

Here are a few screen shots...

This little test machine, which lived a total of 4 hours, would be quite affordable in EC2 at ~$0.41:

Let's imagine that I used this system to do some heavy duty number crunching overnight. ~$14.73 might be a pretty good deal. In fact, if the application I'm running is parallelizes well, it might even be less costly (in time or money) to use one of the 8-CPU large instances:

On the other hand, I have determined that EC2 would not be a good model for my always-up production website, DivItUp.com, which has some 400+ days of uptime, at ~$967.13 and counting:

If you want to run the utility outside of screen-profiles, that's possible too:

There are certainly other factors that you may need to consider, such as the privacy of your data and whether that belongs in a remote cloud, the scalability of your own hardware versus Amazon's, your own heating/cooling/bandwidth costs, etc. before you can make a fully informed decision.

But hopefully this little utility can help with the initial analysis. And like watching your system load, or memory utilization, it might help you better understand the nature of your server's workloads.

4 comments:

This would be useful for the sysads who actually manage EC2 instances and not even mindful of the cost and just think its just a few cents per hour. I've had a lot of stories of people using EC2 to run their websites and balk at their monthly bill because it became much more expensive than their former hosts.

Of course, I've had my fair share of good stories of utilizing EC2 to run 200+ servers for a specific job and destroy them servers after a day or two when the job is finished.

Printfriendly

About the Author

Previously, Dustin was the VP of Product at Canonical, having led the amazing team that delivers Ubuntu, from the Cloud to IoT commercial offerings.

Formerly the CTO of Gazzang, a venture funded start-up acquired by Cloudera, Dustin designed and implemented a key management system for cloud applications, called zTrustee, and delivered comprehensive security for cloud and big data platforms with eCryptfsand other encryption technologies.